


Lost Boys

by MyMissus (oof1dficreally), oof1dficreally



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hipsters, Brooklyn, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 04:20:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/657955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oof1dficreally/pseuds/MyMissus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/oof1dficreally/pseuds/oof1dficreally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...And if the city never sleeps, then that makes two."</p><p>Louis owns a farm-to-table restaurant in the sickeningly hip Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn. Harry is the young, tatted-up food supplier. Zayn tends bar. Niall is an auto mechanic who bootlegs in his off hours and Liam is his best friend who has just moved to town to get over a break up. At first, diving head first into the alt world of the city that never sleeps seems like the perfect way to stay distracted. But Liam soon finds that behind the late hours, strong drinks, shared cigarettes and weekends that last all week even the place he escaped to is full of people with something to escape from.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just wanted to take a quick second because I felt the need to clarify that I live in Williamsburg and am sort of trying to make this as accurate a depiction as possible. For some reason I felt it was important to say that, just so one wouldn't think I was just making up stuff based on what I've seen of hipsters on Tumblr. I guess it was tagging it as "AU - hipster" that made me do this. Actually loathe the word. Of course I do, I live in Williamsburg. Anyway, just wanted you all to know that coming in. Actual, realistic as I can AU in Brooklyn! Not just triangles and MGMT...

       Liam could hear the gangster rap from North 11th.  
       The way Niall had described it, 12th street would run along the park – and this was North 12th and this was Brooklyn and Liam wasn’t supposed to get that confused with another 12th and another park on another island entirely. Your ears will pop, he’d said, when the train goes under the water. They had. And now with Public Enemy blaring down the street through the gray dusk, Liam was more sure than ever he’d done everything just right.  
       Niall lived in a studio flat over a car garage called Wild Ride. Niall made a lot of lewd jokes about this over the course of their pan-Atlantic calls. The shop was owned by someone named Derek who Niall said was massive and stayed in Germany two thirds of the year. So, Derek wouldn’t mind if Liam came to stay with him for free for a while. Which was lucky because when your girlfriend of several years dumps you for your younger brother, the only face you can stand is a decade-old best friend’s. Niall would have the answers, Liam thought, rounding the corner to Wild Ride and wincing at the volume. He had to.  
       Niall hung by his knees from a car lift.  
       “Oi! Bro!”  
       He swung down with a perplexing combination of adeptness and near catastrophe. A younger kid in a hat had a motorcycle propped up to Niall’s right and gave Liam a sideways glance through a pair of protective goggles as Liam stood his massive suitcase and entered.  
       It all seemed a bit strange. But as soon as Niall reached him Liam was scooped into a massive hug and he breathed a sigh of relief.  
       “You made it! You’re here!” Liam could feel the vibration of Niall’s shouts into his shoulder. He sounded drunk. Here might not be so unlike Manchester after all. “Oh, what has it been, an hour in the States? Come on. Let’s get you laid.”  
       Liam choked. “I could stand a shower.”  
       But Niall had him by the elbow and headed for the door. “Nah, you shower after, man. How long has it been? Let’s go. American girls. Accents. It’s the miracle we’ve always waited for.”  
       “Niall – “  
       “Lucas, watch the shop!”  
       “The shop’s closed…?” the younger kid said.  
       “Niall!” Liam chuckled.  
       “Ugh, alright,” Niall scoffed but when he turned back his face still beamed with a smile. “Liam,” he said and shook Liam by the shoulders. “You’re in New York!”  
       Liam’s stomach fell to his shoes the same time his heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t help but be excited that this was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.  
       “Now, it’s a studio,” Niall was already dragging Liam’s suitcase along with Liam to a slatted staircase behind the office. “So that means that everything’s in the same room. Well not the bathroom, I mean it’s not a prison, but we’ll be sharing a space.”  
       Liam shrugged. “That’ll be fine. I’ll get a job. I’ll find my own place.”  
       “No, sure, sure,” Niall agreed not sounding so sure. “You’ll find a room.”  
       “A room?”  
       “But in the mean time don’t sell the place short. Here, take the other handle, the staircase is crooked.” They commenced their climb. “We come in and out out the side of the garage so there’s not really a deadbolt, but in the summer the door swells so it’s real hard to get open just without it. Step over the gap.” Liam complied, a glimpse of the cement floor below scrolling past his elevated sneakers. “Sometimes Lucas will come in early to start working on cars, so sleep on the right side of the building. Mail comes in under the garage door; there’s a crate. And garbage has to stay on the inside because Derek doesn’t have sidewalk zoning. But recycling has to stay outside with the neighbors stuff, because the mice will chew through the cardboard.” He dropped Liam’s suitcase onto the landing. Liam could still hear Niall’s mix blaring from below. “Jiggle the lock.”  
       Niall jostled his front door open, the startling shade of forest green swinging back to reveal a single room with a scratched wooden floor, futon, hand-built coffee table and a TV the size of a small house. Empty Guinness cans were the room’s only decorative element. He had a mini fridge.  
       “I like it,” Liam said. “I’m really gonna need a job, though.”  
       Niall’s face seemed to register Liam’s disappointment. He raised an eyebrow at this own place of residence.  
       “You are,” he agreed. “Fortunately you’re in Brooklyn, mate. Everyone knows a guy.”  
       “You know someone then?”  
       Niall shrugged. “I got someone in mind.”  
         
       “Heads up or your wearing it!”  
       You couldn’t squeeze through between the bar and the raised tables on a Saturday night at Lost Boys. Couples on dates, groups having parties, families with kids that ran off and introduced themselves to girls who had whiskey shots sloshing into the purses in their hands. Even the seats that faced out the windows were filled this April night, because you rather come here and stare at the street than be anywhere else when moonshine was on special and the food all came in the back seat of some skinny, tattooed-up 19-year-old’s Honda that very morning.  
       You couldn’t squeeze through, that is unless you were Louis Tomlinson, the owner of said establishment, and you were threatening to dump a plate of caramelized fennel risotto onto anyone who blocked your path.  
       “I see your look, Terry,” he threatened one of the waitresses who howled with laughter as he passed. “You doubted my Oregano, so I added extra for you. I’m having these girls report back. Here you go, love.” He set the plate down in front of a trio sat quietly in the back of the room. White Christmas lights and mason jar candles gave even the most demure bunch like this the romantic confidence to smile flirtatiously back. “Do me a favor and tell Terry if you like it, alright?”  
       “Thanks, love,” one of the girls responded.  
       Louis laughed. “Ah, I like when American girls say it. Zayn!”  
       He shouted and a pair of yellow eyes behind a sea of drunken revelers at the bar shot up. Louis held up three fingers and pointed at the table of demure girls. Zayn nodded and continued to pour.  
       “If things pick up a bit more, should I help him?”  
       It was the lazy voice of a lazy-postured kid sitting next to the cash register amidst the bottles.  
       “Babe,” Louis hung over the bar and grabbed four sets of silverware from the bin, “if things pick up a bit more I think we’re breaking fire code.” He took off again for the hostess station to relieve his anxious employee. “Farm boy,” he called back to the kid, “fetch me an arugula and apple salad for table twelve!”  
       Farm boy – or Harry as it were – smiled and slid down from the register.  
       “As you wish.”  
       “Table for four?” the hostess was saying in a high pitched sort of panic.  
       “Beth!” Louis called and immediately hugged one of the waiting party. “Jack, how are you?” He shook another’s hand. “Gina’s gonna seat you in like half an hour, okay? We’ve changed to a circus theme, do you like it?” He gestured to the crowd amidst Beth’s and Jack’s approving laughs. “We’re getting elephants. Zayn’s serving Irish lemonade, though, so I encourage you to get hammered before you eat our food. Oh, speaking of Irish lemonade…”  
       The crowd parted for Louis once more as he made his way to the very front of the room where Niall was entering the door and scooped him into a hug as much as he could standing a good few inches shorter.  
       “Holy shit, man. Are you eating? Did you bring me something?” His face grew suspicious. “Why are you awake?”  
       Niall laughed. “I came to ask you something, actually. Bit of a favor.”  
       “Alright, well, come on in, we’ll go out back. Terry!” Louis cleared a path for he and Niall back in the direction of the bar. “Harry’s bringing a salad for twelve, can you check on it? Holy shit, Leslie!” The expectant grin on a nearby woman’s face brightened to finally be recognized as Louis caught her up immediately in yet another hug. “Leslie, your fucking baby!” Across from her did, in fact, sit a man with a toddler clapping excitedly on his knee.  
       “She just turned two, didn’t you, Annette?” Leslie cooed at her.  
       “Annette?” Louis said, the appropriate wonder in his voice. The child beamed. “Annette, I’m stealing you, come here.” And without a second’s hesitation or an ounce of protest from her parents, Louis took Annette in his arms, onto his hip and disappeared with her and Niall into the crowd. Annette did not seem bothered.  
       “Annette, you’re two now.” Annette nodded proudly. “The last time I saw you you were inside your mother, is that weird for you?” Annette confidently shook her head. “That’s brave of you, Annette. Annette, Zayn is gonna show you what a Shirley Temple is.”  
       Zayn passed two drinks to a waiting set of guys across the bar before quickly wiping his hands on a rag and taking the toddler without question from Louis’ hip.  
       “Hey sweetheart,” he said in a voice far too soft spoken for his environment. “Give your parents a wave so Uncle Zayn doesn’t get arrested…”  
       “It’s Annette!” Harry had an arm full of plates of salad.  
       “Aw, man, you’ve seen her?” Louis said.  
       “Yeah, they came in a few months ago.”  
       “How many salads did you make..?”  
       “We needed some on four, don’t judge me.”  
       “Niall’s here.”  
       “Hello, Niall!”  
       “Go away.”  
       “Okay.”  
       Harry wandered off with the salads. Louis and Niall swung into the kitchen, back through a set of wooden doors, and were swallowed by the shocking silence of Louis’ office.  
       “Sit down, bro. Relax.” Louis followed his own command.  
       Louis’ desk was a hurricane, but the office as a whole was more well kept than his mannerisms would have implied. File boxes, neatly labeled, lined one wall, coats and time cards and employee records another. His computer, though surrounded by loose Fruit Loops, was open to an Excel chart filled with tiny unidentifiable numbers. To the right of the screen was a framed five by seven showing an earlier face of the restaurant in front of which stood a younger Louis, a much younger Harry, and a girl in a pair of bright red sunglasses. They all had their arms draped around each other.  
       “You’re not gonna haggle with me now, are you? Because I’ve had a rum and coke.”  
       Louis’ joke brought Niall back to the living.  
       “No, no. I’ve got a favor to ask of you actually. You know, in exchange for my distilling magic.”  
       “Niall, the money I pay you is the exchange rate for your bathtub booze. But for your jaunty friendship, I’ll keep listening anyway.”  
       “I’ve got a friend just in town needs a job.”  
       “Oh, Niall…” Louis leaned back in his desk chair and pulled his beanie down over his eyes.  
       “I know I’ve asked you before – “  
       “You have, mate.”  
       “ – and the last time I did you hired him and now he’s out there on his, like, ninth hour of bartending babysitting a child.”  
       “Annette looks after herself,” Louis muttered into his hat.  
       “It was a good rec.”  
       “You’re a wreck!” he said, petulantly freeing his face from the wool.  
       “He really needs it, man. He’s not doing well. He’s my best mate from back home.”  
       “Niall, man, I’m sorry but that fucking zoo out there?” Louis gestured wildly to the door. “That’s what breaking even looks like, okay? If Annette doesn’t order alcohol with her meal I might not make it, get me? I take on somebody else I gotta cut people, and that’s shit. That’s, like, I don’t know it’s something. It starts with an N and it’s got a P. Zayn would know.”  
       Niall sighed. “There’s nothing? Harry doesn’t need any help with the food, or…?”  
       “Harry’s mum deals with him, I don’t know. But I don’t think so.” Niall nodded sadly. “I’m sorry, man.”  
       “No, no, man, look, it’s fine. We’ll figure something else out.” Niall got up from his seat and slapped Louis five as he made for the door. “He just got dumped in a bad way, you know? He’s looking for a change, that’s all.”  
       Louis watched his back as Niall took a suspiciously long time to gather the hoodie he’d carried in with him. It paid off. Another few seconds feigning to pull the sleeve off the arm of the chair and Louis deflated in his seat.  
       “Cheap move.”  
       “It’s true, though.”  
       “I hate you.”  
       “You can ask him yourself.”  
       Niall lingered by the door while Louis glared like a scolded child at the desk below.  
       He rolled his eyes. “Send him in before we open.”  
       “Thanks, man, I – “  
       “No, go away now before I change my mind.”  
       Niall didn’t hesitate to do so. “I’ll come with him and bring my new stuff,” he said as he bowed gracefully out of the door.  
       It took a second for it to swing shut. Louis could hear him exit the kitchen followed by the gust of carousing that wafted in behind him. He cast one more dark glance at the picture by his computer before hastily readjusting his hat and pushing back into the crowd himself.  
       “Annette! Uncle Louis is back!” He scooped her off the bar and back into his arms. “Hey, what’s the thing where you hire your family instead of being fair?”  
       “Nepotism,” Zayn replied to a bottle of Jack.  
       “Right. Hey, what in the hell is she eating?”  
        “Risotto,” Zayn shot defensively back.  
       Louis’ face lit up.  
       “Annette,” he said eagerly, the signs of a plan flashing across his eyes reflected in the mason jar candles and Christmas lights. “There’s someone I want you to meet named Terry…”  
       And he disappeared, a lost boy back into the crowd.  



	2. Chapter 2

       Liam had known a fair number of long days in his life, but nothing quite like the first day he met Louis and the boys.  
       Jet leg had snapped him awake at the ungodly hour of 6AM, or – as he repeatedly told himself to stop calculating – 11AM English time. Niall, now as native a New Yorker as Liam ever could have imagined him, slept soundly on the other side of the futon until 9:30 when the alarm on his phone vibrated his pillow and gently shook him awake.  
       Liam was unsure of Niall’s present morning routine. Was he a coffee drinker? Was he straight to the shower? Should Liam say hello? In Liam’s mind it was nearly lunchtime so he’d wait to take his cue. He sat dutifully on the edge of the bed, video game controller in hand, FIFA on pause, waited and watched as Niall got up, pulled on his sneakers, and immediately left the apartment shutting the door behind him.  
       Liam watched the shut door, confused and debating whether or not to follow. He looked around the room for an indication. Downstairs the radio went on and blared Justin Bieber out of a top 40 station at an inconsiderate volume. Still uncertain, Liam unpaused the game and continued to play. A few minutes later, Niall busted back through the door.  
       “Can you help with this?” he said in a groggy voice.  
       “Sure,” Liam agreed before turning to see what it was.   
       At his feet, Niall dropped a wooden crate full of cork-stoppered, label-less brown bottles. He wiped his forehead on the back of his hand and grabbed a jacket from the hook.  
       “You ready?”  
       “I…”  
       The honest answer was no. Liam hadn’t been on a job interview in six years. When he pressed Niall for information about the person he’d be meeting all Niall had to offer was that he was “you know, Louis,” which was about as helpful as it was verbose. “No,” however, seemed like the wrong answer. So he took the other end of Niall’s illegal drink and walked it the six blocks to the main drag and Lost Boys restaurant.  
       Niall knocked loudly on the half-raised shutter when they got there. A muffled voice inside yelled that it was open. Liam begged to differ. But Niall, not skipping a beat, ducked under the shutter, dragging the liquor, and used his backside to push open the front door.   
       The inside was quiet and deserted. It took a second to find the source of the, “it’s open,” before spotting a dark and scruffy kid wearing glasses that didn’t suit his tattoos head first in a Dostoyevsky behind the bar.  
       “Hey, Niall,” Zayn said.  
       “Yo. This is Liam.”  
       Zayn blinked at him - “Hey, Liam,” – and returned to his book.  
       “Louis here?”  
       “In the back.”  
       Liam helped Niall haul his load back through the swinging kitchen doors on the other side of the bar and drop it next to the industrial fridge. A cold breeze drew Liam’s attention to the back of the room where a running engine droned on and gray morning daylight burst in silhouetting a handful of people by the service door.  
       “I asked you specifically if you were – “  
       “You told me specifically.”  
       “ – when I planned the menu it was the first thing that I – “  
       “I don’t think anyone taught you the difference between asking and telling.”  
       “ – you understand that if I can’t make a cole slaw, I have to completely change the – “  
       “One is a thing that you do and one is not.”  
       Liam had to be amused at the way the taller one was handling the one in a bit of a panic. He slouched in front of him, his one hand rested in his sweatshirt pocket, the other casually spinning his car keys, wearing an expression of vague amusement while his friend spun circles around him with his words.  
       “Okay,” Harry finally interrupted. He placed one hand on either side of Louis’ face. “Listen to me. I’m gonna explain it to you. But you have to promise me you’re going to really listen to what I’m saying. Repeat that.”  
       Louis sighed. “But you have to promise me you’re going to really listen to what I’m saying.”  
       Harry raised his eyebrows. Louis looked perturbed.  
       “Promi - ”  
       “I promise!”  
       “Okay.” Harry smiled. “Cabbage is mostly grown in the late summer and the fall. We can store the rest through  - “  
       “Boooooored!”  
       “You promised.” Louis stopped squirming. “We can store it through winter, but we didn’t yield as much this year and we ran out in March. You can do a broccoli slaw. Or you can shut the fuck up and make an endive salad.” Louis just stood peering at Harry through his hands. “Okay?” Louis nodded. Harry leant down and pecked him on the mouth before relinquishing his face and hopping back out the service entrance to his car.  
       “Oh hey,” Niall said, pushing past a thoroughly mystified Liam to greet the boys. “Louis, this is Liam.”  
       Louis gave them a dazed sort of look. “Hello, Liam. I’ve just been sexually harassed.”  
       “You loved it,” Harry’s voice carried in on the breeze.  
       “But it’s nothing to worry about yourself because naturally he’ll have to be fired.”  
       “Hey,” Harry popped his head back in. “A dollar every time you fire me.”  
       Louis took out his wallet and passed Harry a single. Harry pocketed it just as naturally in an exchange that went unexplained before Louis led Liam and Niall back through the kitchen doors.  
       “Did Zayn grunt at you when you came in by way of introduction?”  
       “Fuck you.” Zayn turned the page in his book.  
       “Pretty lady.” Louis leaned over the bar on his elbows, reached a hand and gently touched Zayn’s cheek, giving him wry yet charming smile. “I need you to show Liam here some things, okay? Like where things are. And what they are. And a list of all the foods and drinks, you know, um, ever. And… just basically everything, you know? Um… in a half an hour. Is that okay?” He stroked him again. “Lovely one?”  
       “So, your job, basically?”  
       “You know, no? But in a greater, truer sense, yes.”  
       “Okay.”  
       “Thank you, love. I would but I’ve got to replan the menu. Harry didn’t tell me I wouldn’t have cabbages.”  
       “Yes I did.” Harry had reentered, carrying a crate of fresh flowers through the door.  
       “Obviously I’ve got to fire him for it.”  
       “That’s another dollar.”  
       “Liam.” It was the first time Louis had stopped to look at him yet. “This is gonna be a bit of a learn as you go type scenario. I’m throwing you in the middle of it. If you sink, you sink, no hard feelings. If you stay up, you got a job. It’s a bit harsh perhaps, but…” There was no end to that sentence. Louis only shrugged.  
       Something about the severity of that bolstered Liam’s drive. If he could fucking emigrate on two weeks’ notice, he could put some food onto tables and learn the differences between forks. Louis seemed nice enough, sure. But Liam was determined just the same not to let this little guy win.  
       So, he gave his most casual shrug in return. “Yeah, sure. Sounds good.”  
       Louis slapped a hand on his shoulder, then promptly ignored him for Niall. “What in the hell did you bring me?”  
       “Did you try it?” Niall evaded.  
       “I did, and I felt amazing, but then quickly like maybe I would die…”  
       Their voices faded back into the kitchen and their images were replaced with the face of Zayn the bartender, laying a hand on Liam’s shoulder and smiling like maybe he was trying to be really encouraging and maybe he really didn’t care.  
       “You ready?”  
       Liam nodded. “Yeah.”  
       Zayn smiled wider. “No you’re not.” He pointed behind Liam’s left shoulder. “That’s table one.”  
       The next twelve hours were nothing if not a massive blur.  
       Liam learned  where the silverware was and the cups. He learned when to fill water, when to refill it, and when to let it go dry so people would get the fuck out and let the table turn over. He learned what a table turning over was, how to quicken it, and how to slow it down to encourage a patron to buy more drinks. He learned that drinks were over half their money, but that no one came here to drink, they came here for the much-hyped food, so he learned that there was a delicate balance between how much you recommend someone order at the start of the meal and how much you push on them once they’ve had a few and they get a chance to eye what everyone else is eating. He learned drinks – some drinks – but over all Zayn seemed very possessive of the area so it was really just about pouring beer on tap, opening a bottle or two, then getting the hell out of the way.  
       Then the doors opened at 11.   
       Liam was surprised to find twelve people waiting to eat. It was 11, what kind of meal were these people eating at 11? That’s when he learned about brunch and how brunch was the most popular time of the week for the restaurant save for Saturday night. Upon learning this Liam managed to catch eyes with Louis who was leaving a table he’d been chatting up to go back in the kitchen. Louis smiled at him, mouthed the words “sink or swim” and ducked inside.  
       By the time 3 o’clock came around and the brunch crowd died Liam thought he was about ready to go back to sleep. Then something miraculous happened around 4 and the energy kicked right back in. He took the down time to go through everything’s location and everything’s purpose and the menu about a hundred more times even though he was told it changed every week. A new set of waiters and waitresses shuffled in about 5. Liam noted that there was at least one shift change per day but that Louis, Zayn, and Harry stayed for absolutely all of it. He wondered if they did that every day. Even Niall yawned and left just before dinner time, taking with him a to-go bag of skirt steak and endive salad. He said he’d see them later.   
       Later when?  
       Just as Liam marveled at the rapidity with which Zayn could pour a drink, the sheer number of plates and orders Harry could juggle and the unwavering smile on Louis face all after ten solid hours of being on their feet he found that he, too, had in him a third wind. It was this that carried him through the dinner rush at 8 during which Liam found also that he knew every item’s location, every special, and every brand of liquor they had to offer at the bar. He was even making recommendations to a table of girls in the back, saying they simply had to try the squash, they just had to, even though he himself hadn’t had a bite of food to eat all day. He served dozens of tables, Zayn stirred hundreds of drinks, Louis had paid out $17 by now to Harry for all the instances in which he’d been fired. It was an unfathomable amount of work and time.  
       The best sound in the world, Liam was sure, was the snapping of the lock at 10PM when the last customers left. They had had the world’s longest conversation with Louis about the drug store closing down the street before they’d honored Liam with their exit, and when the lock did snap, he collapsed onto a bar stool that was the most comfortable bar stool he’d ever collapsed onto in his life.  
       The first words, however, out of Louis’ mouth shocked him.  
       “What time is Janie’s thing again?”  
       Zayn was wiping down the bar. “Starts at 11 I think.”  
       Harry nodded over a stack of freshly washed glasses.  
       “Anyone fancy a kick around before we head over?”  
       The other two boys nodded. Liam did his best not to stare mouth agape at all three of them.  
       “What about you, Liam, you in?” Louis watched him casually over the stack of Harry’s glasses he was drying.  
       Liam raised an eyebrow. “Does this mean I stayed afloat?”  
       Louis smiled. “You’re hired, bro. Now go out back and help Carlos and Kendra with the washing up.”  
       The last half hour dragged more than any ten hours before it with the sudden drop in pace. Quietly, as the boys gathered their things and joked and timed out and locked up again heading out to the sidewalk, Liam counted his tips for the night which had all been shoved inside his messenger bag as he went. On top of salary, in one day, Liam had made just under $400.  
       “Not bad, eh?” Zayn had caught him folding his wad of bills.  
       “Not bad at all. How much do you usually make?”  
       “You can’t hold yourself to Zayn’s standards,” Harry said, pulling the shutter back down over the front door and securing the pad lock. “He’s got those lovely eyes.”  
       Zayn rolled his lovely eyes and lit up a cigarette.  
       “Anyone need to go to theirs first?” Louis asked and the other boys shook their heads. “East River then?” They nodded and were off.  
         
       Harry always liked the way civilization dropped off the farther you walked towards the water. The restaurant was on a busy street, and that was fortunate for business, but it was a street that honestly never shut up, and some nights when they were out on it, going from bar to bar, trying to catch a match on TV or a person Louis had promised they’d meet up with Harry got tired of side-stepping the people, of excusing himself, of being looked at.  
       As you walked towards the East River things got immediately more residential. As you neared it even more it was downright industrial, populated with lofts and warehouses and lofts built out of warehouses, peppered with the odd modern high rise that looked like a monstrosity next to all the culture. The last street, Kent Street, was almost always empty save for cabs or a random jogger. Nestled between two such high rises was a sneaky entrance to the dock where the East River ferry commuted by ten times a day, a line of benches, and a small park.  
       Whereas the official East River Park closed not long after dark this overhead-lit space of land stayed open as long as people decided it did. On late nights after work he and the boys came here to kick around a ball and blow off some steam because both Zayn and Louis found it almost impossible after work to go straight to bed. When Niall played it was even. When he didn’t Harry and Zayn teamed up against Louis because, frankly, neither of them could play. Louis was quite good. He could have been very good had he continued with school. Louis could have been a lot of things, actually, Harry thought. He shouted for the ball.  
       “You’re not kicking off, you’re rubbish at it.”  
       “Yeah but you’re feeling generous tonight. Give it.”  
       “I say let Liam do it since he’s new,” Zayn offered. Liam blushed.  
       “I say let me do it or else we’ll be here all night. Liam you’re on my team heads up!” Louis shouted without pause and before he knew it Liam had a ball flying in his direction.  
       They played for nearly an hour. They played until Liam was sweating and Louis was sweating and Harry was sweating and Zayn was sort of sweating but not really because he hadn’t put a tremendous amount of effort in. Niall had joined them around half way and hopped in to Harry’s team, which meant that the others were more or less watching Louis and Niall play one on one by the time the evening was due to come to an end.  
       The last fifteen minutes were when it truly devolved. Harry dived to muss Zayn’s hair, Zayn ran off, and somehow Louis thought an appropriate response to all this was to tackle Harry to the ground. Someone’s shoe came off – no one was certain in the dark whose it was – and then it became about keeping that shoe away from its rightful owner as long as they could. Of course as no one was prepared to claim the shoe, they all mutually agreed to toss it into the East River. It wasn’t until they were trudging back to Louis’ place that Niall took inventory and realized it must have just been a shoe they found on the ground.  
       “Ugh, I touched that.”  
       “That’s unfortunate,” Harry said in his lazy drone.  
       “Your mum’s unfortunate,” Niall shot maturely back.  
       “Yeah, well,” was Harry’s only reply.  
       “How is she?” Louis asked.  
       “My mum? My mum’s fine. My mum’s my mum, you know?”  
       “No I mean – “  
       Everyone went silent and Liam looked round. If possible, Louis sounded both impatient for the answer and impatient with himself for asking the question in the first place. Finally Harry’s gravelly voice broke in.  
       “Is this a day where you actually want to know?”  
       “No,” Louis said rather quickly and some sort of tension deflated in the group.  
       Liam still had an eyebrow raised. “So,” he tested, “how long have you owned the place, Louis?”  
       “Uh,” Louis started, “years.”  
       “How did you get it?”  
       “Inherited.”  
       A quick assessment of the number of words Louis was presently using versus the number he usually used indicated to Liam that this was also an unsafe topic. He tried again.  
       “Who is Janie?”  
       “Ex-girlfriend,” Zayn replied.  
       “Of Zayn’s,” added Louis. “No one really knows why it didn’t work out with them, but running theory is that their name was too similar. It’s her brother’s birthday, which no one here really cares about.” A round of shaking heads confirmed it. “But Janie always throws amazing parties, so off we go. One second, I’ll be right down.”  
       They’d reached what would be categorized on Harry’s list of potential buildings in the area as a loft made out of a warehouse. By the light that went on moments later, Liam deduced Louis lived in the top floor. He imagined the view from up there was spectacular.  
       “He live up there alone?”  
       “As much as Louis can, yeah,” was Harry’s cryptic response.  
       “Meaning…?”  
       “Well, I stay with him sometimes. Zayn sometimes. Sometimes someone else. Louis’s place is massive. It’s got four bedrooms built in and he sleeps on the sofa in front of the TV. Just likes company, that’s all.”  
       “Where do the rest of you live?”  
       “Uh, you know,” Harry shrugged. “Not in a shit pile with Niall.”  
       “Hey,” Niall said. “That rhymed.”  
       Harry nodded.  
       “I live down south by the bridge,” Zayn offered Liam, seeming a bit guilty that Harry and Louis were fans of talking in code. “Harry lives hypocritically out by the next stop with a girl and a cat and a kitchen the size of a shit closet.”  
       “Your girl?” Liam asked.  
       “My girl…?” Harry’s face screwed up in an illegible expression.  
       “My girl,” Zayn sung.  
       “My girl,” Niall chimed in.  
       “Talking ‘bout my girl,” Harry caught on.  
       “My girl.”  
       The door behind them slammed. Louis had changed hats and put on a fresh shirt. He still wore the same shitty pair of Converse under rolled up jeans. Most suspected he slept in them.  
       “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Don’t want to know. Shall we?”  
       Liam checked the time on his phone. “We’re really gonna roll into this party at 1AM?” His mind calculated it. He couldn’t help it. It was 6AM in England.  
       “Well,” Louis said, turning them onto another street. “I’m sure there will be some people left.”  
         
       There were many people left. Janie’s place was full.  
       People poured out into the streets for a smoke break, lined the halls catching people on the way to other floors, filled rooms with sound systems and DJs and counters of liquor. The girls apparently owned the whole place. It was hard to be jealous of from the outside, but inside was a different story. Liam currently shared a one room futon.   
       The boys found the kitchen as easily as if it were their own place. Harry poured them drinks and shortly after that Zayn disappeared. Louis said he was off to “appease the Gods” which Liam interpreted to mean he was off to tell Janie they’d arrived. But he’d never be able to confirm that, because he didn’t see Zayn the rest of the night.  
       It could have been waking up at 6AM, it probably was having hardly a scrap of food all day, but Liam was drunk the first sip he took. He was plastered by the end of the drink. Niall handed him another and the rest of the night was only a series of poorly recounted moments.   
       Harry went off to talk with some guy a bit older than him in a blazer and a pair of round sunglasses he was wearing indoors. Louis said hi to everyone, remembered each time they’d last been in the restaurant, knew people’s names, sister’s names, freelance side projects and favorite songs like he was a diplomat’s personal assistant. He talked to everyone but no one for that long. As Niall led Liam around the room, Louis checked in with them occasionally, and one of the things Liam would remember the next day and for a long while after was how when Niall came back to him with another drink some time in the evening, Louis caught it before it reached Liam’s hand and threw it away.  
       Other than that there was dancing and smoking and chatting up girls who wanted to know how he knew the other boys and where in England he was from even though the name “West Midlands” meant nothing to their American ears. At an unidentified time Liam found himself in a sudden panic over making sure he had his phone, which was in his pocket but which he was convinced was not. He wandered through rooms until he found Louis, Harry, and the older guy with a couple other people on a couch somewhere passing around a joint. He intended to join them, but the next thing he remembered was walking up Wythe Street headed home. It was only the four of them. He really never did see Zayn again.  
       “You can handle him all the way, right?” Louis asked Niall who gave a tired sort of nod.  
       “Is it November?” Liam asked, which everyone could tell somewhere in his head made sense, but the first seven steps that had led to the drunk thought were missing from their end of the conversation. They laughed.  
       “Not quite, Liam,” Harry replied. They walked a few more minutes in silence.  
       “You okay?” Louis asked.  
       The others turned but it was only Harry who nodded. “Yeah.”  
       “You know where he went?”  
       “Do we ever?” Harry laughed humorlessly.  
       “Mm.”  
       They passed Louis’ loft and he waved the boys goodnight. Without a verbal exchange of any kind on the matter, Harry followed him inside.   
       “Do you do this every night?” Liam managed to spit out, though all the D’s in the sentence gave him a bit of a struggle. Niall confirmed it. “How?”  
       Niall shrugged and wearily rubbed his eyes. “What’s the alternative?”  
       When they pushed their way through the unlocked front door Liam saw that Lucas was already there turning on some lights around the garage. They teetered up the stairs, locked themselves in, and Niall launched himself fully clothed onto the futon, still unmade from the morning. He fell instantly asleep. Liam finally acknowledged that his phone had been in his pocket the whole time and was relieved. When he plugged it in he noted the time. It was 6AM, 11AM in England. Definitely time to go to sleep.  
       The sun was only very slightly starting to peek up over the Manhattan skyline when Louis and Harry wandered inside after the party. Louis tossed his keys and they both collapsed on the couch. For a moment it seemed they were settled, until Harry got up quietly and went to go throw up in the bathroom. When he got back, he sunk into the sofa, and Louis put an arm around him.  
       “Are you upset he didn’t come over?” he said. His voice sounded uncharacteristically quiet, getting lost in the massive space and the massive city in an hour in which everything seemed to get swallowed.  
       “A little.” Harry shrugged.  
       “You know I’m not talking about Nick, right?”  
       “Yeah.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked even more than usual like a child. “You’re probably happy about it.”  
       “I’m not happy,” Louis said. “I’m not happy you’re upset.”  
       “Okay.”  
       Harry sunk down a bit more and leaned his head on Louis’ shoulder. They both stared out the window and at the approaching sun.  
       “I love living here,” Harry murmured into Louis’ t-shirt.  
       “Me, too.” His voice was even quieter than before. It didn’t sound much like him at all. “How is she?” Harry didn’t answer at first. “This is a time where I want to know.”  
       Harry draped an arm over Louis’ stomach and sighed. “She’s okay. I talked to her on the phone last Sunday. She talks a lot about coming back, but she doesn’t sound like she means it.”   
       Louis squirmed like he would try to run away, but ended up just settling down deeper into the couch and Harry’s arm. “Does she sound better?”  
       “It’s Erin, she always sounds fine. Until she doesn’t.” Harry rubbed his face again. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. I think it’s just mum.”  
       “I know that. I know there’s nothing…” Louis let his voice trail off, perhaps made it do so so as not to disturb the quiet of the morning.  
       Harry squeezed his waist. “Don’t be mad at her.”  
       “I’m not mad at her,” said Louis sounding quite upset indeed.  
       “She misses you.”  
       “Did she say that?”  
       Harry shrugged. “Doesn’t have to.”  
       “Yes she does.” This time it was barely above a whisper. The boys stayed sunk into the couch together as the view through the window got brighter and brighter. “You can use one of the rooms if you want to.”  
       “Okay.” But he didn’t move. His eyelids sunk lower and he started to hide his face in Louis’ chest from the sun. “Do you think something like that’s gonna happen to me?”  
       Louis’ eyes sunk lower too, and he started to tilt sideways on the couch. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”  
       The implied “I won’t let it” went unsaid as the two boys slid farther into the cushions and each other and drifted off to sleep.  
  



	3. Chapter 3

       The following morning Liam dragged himself in at eleven AM. The three usual boys were already there crowded into the bar, Louis tilted with a pencil over a chart on a piece of paper, Harry and Zayn prepping the space. Liam set about cleaning and dressing the tables while the boys muttered early morning conversation.  
       “Where’d you end up last night?” Harry asked.  
       Zayn shrugged. “Just Janie’s mostly. 4th floor. We were up on the roof for a bit.”  
       “You and Janie?” He said this to a glass.  
       Zayn shrugged again and this time didn’t answer.  
       “What’re you doing?” Liam called to Louis. “Need help?”  
       Louis stayed perched on a stool with his knees bent, feet crossed on the bar. He shook his head imperceptibly so Liam didn’t know if it was intended for him or the paper.  
       “D’you see Helen there last night?” Zayn asked Harry, a laugh in his voice.  
       Harry smiled. “Yeah, she was wicked messed up when I saw her. She kept hanging on me and telling me to call the fire department.”  
       “She’s going to Columbia, d’you know that?” Zayn laughed again.  
       “Shut up.” Harry burst into a laugh of his own.   
       “Yeah. Political Science.”  
       They burst into a fit. Liam remembered the girl they were discussing. She hung around with the guy in the round sunglasses and, though he didn’t recall the fire department, had seemed quite smitten with Harry.  
       “You should get her number,” he said. “She seems fun.”  
       He chuckled but none of the other boys joined in. When he looked up Zayn and Harry were gaping at him both, and Louis shook with laughter though his eyes sparkled at the paper still.  
       “Man, Liam, really?” Harry finally spoke.  
       “Really what?”  
       He smiled quite big. “You really haven’t put it together yet?”  
       “Liam, I’m obsessed with you,” Louis said, flipping over one of the sheets. “You’re a right little alien. I’m gonna make love to you, I swear.”   
       “What’s going on…?”  
       “Liam,” Harry chuckled, “I’m gay, man. I’m… I’m quite gay.”  
       The other boys chuckled as well, both still pouring over their work, maybe to hide judgmental looks that would further enhance Liam’s embarrassment.  
       “I…” Liam began. “Oh.”  
       “Mm,” Harry replied, beaming still. “But I’ll get her number for you if you’d like. You’re right. She’s fun.” He tilted his head with consideration. “If you’re into vaginas.”  
       Liam could only blush. Louis collapsed in a laughing fit onto his papers.  
       That day’s biggest rush was around two, after which Zayn ducked out to go to his second job, undefined. Liam stayed on until close, helping Harry with the glasses while Louis struggled still with what was apparently the staff schedule.  
       “Did Chelsea ask for next week off?” he called to no one in particular.  
       “Yeah,” Harry replied. “She’s going to Spain.”  
       “Well la-dee-da…” Louis muttered erasing an entire line on the sheet.  
       “You know, you could just hire someone to take care of the paperwork for you,” Liam said. This got Louis to look up, if only to roll his eyes.  
       “Wow, Liam, that has literally never occurred – “ His eyes caught something on the bar and he froze. “Who’s are those?”  
       Liam’s rag touched a pair of red sunglasses sat alone on the bar. He picked them up to inspect, and found there was no one left in the restaurant but them. Harry caught Louis’ eye and he shrugged. A loud knock at the door startled them all.  
       “Hello, are you still open?”  
       Harry snapped the lock and let in a girl, young, blonde, and frantic over her lost property.  
       “Oh my God, thank you! They were so expensive, I never buy anything expensive.” She took the glasses from Liam’s hand. “Thank you!” she called again before running to catch up her friends. Louis hunched back over the schedule.  
       That night Liam was out until 4. The night after that, 4 again. From there on out he had to try to insist on his sleep, especially when Louis had him on morning shifts, but he wasn’t always successful. See, no matter how concrete his plans to go home, play a bit of FIFA with Niall, eat some leftover food from Lost Boys and go to bed, the Lost Boys themselves had a way of roping you in to their plans regardless. No matter what they had on schedule, when they described it, it always managed to seem like the most fascinating thing in the world. A concert, a bar, someone Zayn works with has got an art show and Thurston Moore is supposed to be there. Liam only knew who Thurston Moore was in passing and he still felt compelled to attend.   
       And after every first plan there was a second, and that was usually where Liam started to feel that maybe he should have just gone home. Because after the first place or maybe the second everyone was a little to drunk to be quite as polite as they maybe usually had been. And one or more of them would break off with people they introduced to Liam and then stole away, and Liam wouldn’t see one or more of them, often Zayn, sometimes Louis, for the rest of the night, unless he caught them sometime later with someone they had introduced to him doing something he wasn’t aware they did with that person at all.  
       The pinnacle example of this came two Fridays on when another evening kicking a ball around a park had turned into a friend’s show in a metal bar on the east side of the neighborhood. The four of them sat at a booth with the guitarist who Zayn also worked with Liam still didn’t know where and a group of girls, some who looked there for the band, others more approachable for the boys. Three tequila shots later the room spun to show Harry and Louis arguing by a photobooth where a girl, skirt hiked, hung onto Louis’ t-shirt. They were caught in what to tequila drowned Liam was a comical tug of war, Harry now gripping Louis’ left arm in an apparent attempt to wrench him free of his insistent companion. Louis looked mad just before he began laughing to the point of tears.  
       After a short rest in the booth, Liam opened his eyes to Louis again, this time free of both companions and offering him a hand and a walk home. He closed his tab and complied. The cool evening air and the fresh scent of it served to slightly sober him up.  
       “Who was that girl in the photobooth?” Liam said. He always found starting conversations with Louis quite awkward, if only because he was plagued with the constant concern of being mocked.  
       Louis laughed at him, a fear quickly come true. “You really are quite the observant one, aren’t you, Liam?”  
       “I tune in.”  
       “Yeah, well, you’ve got your dial set to only pick up on ways to make me feel like I’ve done something wrong.”  
       “It just seems like you need help with things sometimes,” Liam tried to drunkenly explain.  
       “Is there something about me seems like I need someone to watch out?”    
       “Yeah,” Liam confidently concluded. “You look so…” He searched for the proper word. “…disappointed sometimes. You all three do. Only the other two have got you to address it, haven’t they? I figure you need someone, too.”  
       Louis didn’t reply and Liam didn’t venture a glance. They walked quietly together until they reached Wythe and Liam began to contemplate his one room apartment and the girl Niall had taken home.  
       Louis anticipated this. “You wanna stay at mine tonight, mate?”  
       “Oh god, could I?”  
       “Yeah, come on up.”  
       They had managed to call it a night at such a point as it was still completely dark. The street and the hallway in Louis’ building were empty alike, and the rattle of the elevator that took them up to Louis’ floor echoed heavily in Liam’s increasingly groggy head. When they reached the front door, a faint sound issued from within. He looked to Louis to gauge the normalcy of such a thing, for he’d determined by now that New York buildings could be plagued with pretty much anything from broken ventilation systems to noisy heaters to rats. Louis didn’t seem alarmed though. He pushed open the door and the noise got louder.  
       Liam could hear now it was human in nature. Louis’ four small lofted bedrooms were built in to the side of the apartment nearest the door in a cluster that overlooked the kitchen. What was now clearly a loud moaning poured through the cracks in the wood of the room nearest the end, and Liam watched it suspiciously out of the corner of his eye.  
       “That one’s taken,” Louis said, tossing his keys onto the kitchen island. “But take any other one you’d like.”  
       “Is that Harry?”  
       Louis nodded tiredly, dropping onto the couch and flipping on a record with the press of a remote. It drowned out the grunting but only just slightly.  
       “I didn’t see him take someone home.”  
       Louis shook his head. “He was probably already here.”  
       “Who?”  
       Louis’ smile shone through the hands he had covering his face. “Liam, we’re a complex bunch.”  
       “No, really.” Liam took a few stumbling steps back hoping maybe he could see through the tiny portal window far up on the side of the room. “How many people have a key to your place?”  
       “Just the three of us, man,” Louis sighed, still covering his face and sliding into a more comfortable position on the couch.  
       “Then who did…” The rest of the line died in Liam’s throat. He took a second to carefully balance which sort of humiliation he was most willing to endure – that of assuming too much or not enough. Having already had to swallow the second pill today he took a stabbing guess. “Zayn?”  
       Louis nodded into a pillow.  
       “Him, too?”  
       Louis shrugged. “On occasion.”  
       Liam glanced between Louis and the window many times before planting himself firmly at Louis’ side, causing a wave of motion that stirred Louis from his attempt at ignorant sleep.  
       “No,” said Liam. “I’m gonna let you evade all kinds of things, okay? But this you’re fucking explaining. I have to work with them in the morning. I require some context.”  
       Louis sighed like a petulant child but sat up nonetheless. He shrugged again. “I don’t know, man. Zayn dates girls. But every now and then, usually when he’s pretty beyond fucked up, he ends up back here with him. Is he gay? Are there other dudes? These are things I can’t fucking tell you. He just ends up here. Wish for the sake of Harry he’d at least do it once when he was sober.”   
       The last sentence didn’t seem to be for Liam to hear. As if on cue at that moment the moaning above reached its noisy and sloppy climax with a thud that may or may not have been against the nearest wall but at the very least sounded like it. Louis smiled wryly and lifted a celebratory hand in the air.   
       “Well done, boys!” he called, Liam couldn’t believe how loud, and the room above emitted two muffled chuckles. “Look, I’m falling asleep. Take the first room, okay?” Liam had a dozen more questions but instinctively knew to obey. Louis caught him just before he could reach the stairs. “And hey. You come in and work with them in the morning no matter what or you’re fired. They don’t have to explain shit.”  
       “Hey,” Liam said, “I don’t have a problem with any of it, don’t get me wrong. I’m just trying to figure you fucking people out.”  
       Louis smiled again before sinking back onto the couch. “Hey, us too.”  
         
       The following day Zayn didn’t show.  
       Harry left with Louis first thing in the morning with Liam who left them to go wash up at home. Harry informed Louis that Zayn had not been there when he woke up.  
       Harry cleaned up the bar and set up the bar and served at the bar when the restaurant was open. He watched the door as the people filed in and anticipated seeing there a scruffy and apologetic face but found only ready guests. He could feel Louis watching him closely all morning as he seated and served and chatted people up but he had no desire to meet his gaze or give him the satisfaction of looking upset. So Harry smiled and served and chatted with everyone he could even though being as social as Louis often made him uncomfortable and feel, a little inexplicably, like he needed to go sit a long time quietly in a room. Zayn got that. Sometimes in parties they’d duck away together into a closet and only half the time did they actually make out. The rest of the time they’d just sit there in silence, enjoying the thought that they were being childish, that people were wondering where they were.  
       Harry put Terry on the bar and went out back to plate.  
       So, he didn’t see Zayn come wandering in around noon, sunglasses on, collar on his denim jacket popped up to hide the other half of his face from prying eyes, namely Louis’ who nonetheless spotted him from the back of the room.  
       “Nice to you see you,” he called though he didn’t have time to properly admonish him. He had an order to finish taking and Zayn disappeared quickly into the back room.  
       He slipped by the kitchen and Harry didn’t spot him until he elected to go into Louis’ office and, ironically, look for someone on the phone list to replace him. When he opened the door he quickly spotted he had no need. He raised an eyebrow at Zayn and shut the door behind him.  
       “Where did you go this morning?”  
       “Went back to Charlie’s.”  
       “Charlie’s?”  
       “Yeah,” Zayn flipped through some papers that had nothing to do with him on Louis’ desk. “He looked rough last night, you know? Wanted to make sure he got up okay.”  
       “That’s generous.”  
       “Yeah.”  
       “Pick something up while you were checking up on him?”  
       “Oh for fuck’s sake, man.” Zayn hopped up from the chair. “You’re gonna interrogate me for being late, for not fucking sticking around for a morning tea?”  
       “I don’t give a shit if you stick around, I just don’t see why you need to be going to Charlie’s at nine on a fucking Saturday.”  
       “Yeah, you don’t care,” said Zayn. “You don’t care. Okay.” He headed for the door.  
       “Hey, just talk to me, man, for like five fucking seconds.”  
       “Nah, man, Louis needs me up front. Maybe later.”  
       “Louis needs what?” Louis headed them off in the kitchen.  
       “I got it, bro. I’m going up now.”  
       “What’s the rush?”  
       “Oh okay. Right. Gotta come to his side.”  
       “Are there sides? I’m serious, I walked in late.”  
       “No, let him go,” Harry jumped back in. “I was having a human conversation. It scared him away.”  
       “Ah, fuck.”  
       “Yeah, bro, that’s it. I can’t have serious conversations. I just do a lot of nodding and drawing and pouring liquids into cups. Me Zayn. Me frightened of the skinny kid with the fucking sensitive feelings.”  
       “Guys, can we do the intervention fight later? I’ve, like, ten people waiting for a table.”  
       “Right, am I on bar or serving?”  
       “Yeah, what a convenient fucking time to ask, mate. We’ve only been waiting for you to show up for hours.”  
       “Hey.” Louis held out a hand to Harry’s chest. “I’m the boss. I yell. Zayn, go to the bar.”  
       “Hey, it’s not my fucking fault your fucking comprehension of this situation is so fucking behind. I don’t know how many different ways to explain it to you. I don’t want to fucking talk about it the next day.”  
       “No, I got it.”  
       “That means leaving, that means being late, that means I don’t wanna fucking talk about it at all, okay?”  
       “Zayn.” Louis’ hand on Harry had turned from preventative to protective. He gave Zayn a warning look someone as good natured as Louis shouldn’t be able to pull off. “Go the fucking bar, man.”  
       “Right.” Zayn stormed out.  
       Harry shrugged off Louis’ hand and walked to the back of the room to catch a breath. Louis watched after him just a moment.  
       “Take a second, but I need you out front, okay?”  
       “Yeah,” Harry said at first not turning around. Then, “Ah, fuck it, I’m coming.” He followed  Louis to the floor.  
       “Two hours in I’m pulling employee’s off themselves,” Louis muttered to himself heading through the kitchen doors. “Today’s stacked up to be a rad fucking day.” He slammed a few glasses onto the counter and started pouring water. “No really,” he continued to no one in particular. “Stack it on, I can turn it into something if I have to. Wrestling nights. Terry’s been looking for an excuse to hit me for ages. We could take wagers on the fights. And think of the tips.” He slammed the glasses onto Terry’s tray and she left wide eyed to go deliver them to a table. Louis started grabbing garbage up off the bar. “Got fucking four hours sleep and now I’m referee to confused sexual desires? I don’t fucking think so. I’m gonna start including a line item on everyone’s pay check that stipulates in order to get half your hourly wage from the hours of ten to three you have to shut the hell up. Oh, for God’s sake – really??” he shouted to the bar, a pair of red sunglasses now grabbed up in his hand. “Can we put this shit in our purses, ladies, before I lose my fucking – “  
       Erin wasn’t exceptionally short, but she wasn’t in any way tall. Her hair was the color brown that girls usually dyed over. Her nose was a little too pointed and her chin a little not straight and over all she had, she thought, a very forgettable look that would allow her to blend seamlessly into the background of any decent Alloy catalog. When she left a room people might remember the tattoos or the nose ring, but they rarely remembered her.  
       But at Lost Boys everyone behind the counter stopped just long enough for her to take her red sunglasses back from Louis’ hand and stick them on top of her head, her other hand resting on the handle of a massive suitcase. And in the four and a half second delay she had before Harry dived over the bar and scooped her up into a massive hug she got out one uneasy smile and said,  
       “Hey, Lou.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who already read this - changed Harry's mom's name to Diane. She's gonna be kind of an asshole and Anne is an angel on Earth... :)

       Liam used the early afternoon lull to help Carlos reset the kitchen. This is why he was lining some dishes up in the staging area, startled when the flurry of shouts, grasps, curls and rolling suitcases stumbled into the room.  
       “What are you doing here??” Harry still gripped Erin by one hand and her waist, pulling her through the door, Zayn following behind, Louis bringing up the rear with her suitcase.  
       “I’m… here!” she replied into the fray. “I’m staying for a little while. And I wanted to surprise you, I hope that’s okay.”  
       “Yeah, babe, that’s fine!” His voice was high and excited. His face was simply lit up. “You’ll stay with me, it’s not a big deal. Liam!” He’d spotted Liam by the dishes. “This is my big sister, Erin!”  
       Liam introduced himself, lingering a bit self-consciously outside of the circle.  
       “My sister is back,” Harry continued, almost as if attempting to convince himself. “Are you back back, babe? Are you back for good?”  
       “I’m… on trial leave. They said I could try a few months out as long as I stayed close to home, so…” She shrugged. Her eyes shot a glimpse over to Louis. “I came home.”  
       “Yeah,” Zayn said, “and why do I get the feeling Mum Styles didn’t know this is what you had in mind?”  
       “Sass Malik,” was Erin’s only response to that. “And what is this?” She grabbed his arm. “What is all fucking this?”  
       Zayn rolled up his sleeve to fully expose his half sleeve tattoo. “Do you like it?”  
       “I like this skull,” she said fingering one of the designs. “Did you draw the Zap?”  
       “Yeah,” he said, “I got that and the skull and this palm tree here?” He pointed somewhere else. “And the background filled in.”  
       “Right, and what did you do to my brother while I was gone?”  
       “I got a boat,” Harry said proudly.  
       “And?”  
       “That’s it. Just a boat.”  
       “And I did Louis’ bird.”  
       Zayn stuck a thumb over his shoulder and everyone turned to Louis, still standing by the door guarding Erin’s things. He raised his right hand in an unenthusiastic attempt to show his tattoo. Erin smiled.  
       “Looks nice.”  
       “Thanks.” There was an awkward shuffle in the room. “I, um, don’t want to be an asshole but, you guys are half my…”  
       “Right!”  
       “…wait staff, so…”  
       “No, right,” Harry said. “Bear, here’s my key. Go to my place, same place, and I’ll be there when I get out tonight, okay? We should do something, all of us.” He looked around at the group. “I’ll call Niall.”  
       With one more hug to Zayn and three more to Harry, the two boys and Liam poured back out the doorway through which the party had first come. When they reached the bar to retrieve menus and return to work, Liam cleared his throat.  
       “Can I observe something awkward about this?” The others immediately stood on edge. Liam only smiled. “Your sister is American.”  
       There was an audible exhale of relief.  
       “She is,” Harry said. “She is, I’m adopted.” Liam shook his head. “And I promise next time we meet for the first time, I’ll wear ‘gay and adopted’ on some kind of sign.” Liam chuckled on his way to a table. Before Harry took off as well, he caught eyes with Zayn and gave him a smile. “Fab Four, right?”  
       Zayn smiled back with a nod.  
       Louis let way too much time pass after the kitchen door swung closed behind the others to finally look up and meet Erin’s eye. By the time he did, he’d lost his indifference and was completely disarmed by it. When Louis finds himself without defenses, anyone and especially he could tell you that his natural instinct is to kick free until he can run away. Which is why he was two seconds from following the others before Erin spoke.  
       “So, can I get a look at your back room?”  
       He cracked a smile. “Nice. You work on that?”  
       “Ever since the train. The boys were good, they gave me a sweet awkward pause during which to unveil it.”  
       He nodded. “Go on back.”  
       Louis’ office was the same, windowless half-mess that it usually was, the file boxes and cabinets neatly lining the wall, the desk looking like an incongruous pit. Erin looked over it, however, like Dorothy revisiting Oz. She stood in the center and turned, then walked over to the filing cabinets to take a look.  
       “This is still so neat,” she said.  
       “I know. I did a good job maintaining it, didn’t I?”  
       “Are these all the old deposit slips?”  
       “Yeah, those are from last year.”  
       She moved to another drawer. “You keep all the employee records together now?”  
       “No, those are the old ones. People who quit.”  
       “Rana quit?”  
       “Over Christmas, yeah. She moved to New Orleans.”  
       “Shit.” She shut the drawer and once again looked around the room. “Well, you don’t even need me anymore.”  
       “That’s not true,” Louis replied. Then, “I still need help doing staff schedules.”  
       “Oh, I know pivot tables now.” She said it like it was a threat.  
       “What the fuck is that?”  
       “Excel. I’ve been bored, Louis. I got skills.”  
       Another impossible pause set in. Louis looked at the floor, his unshakeable petulance refusing to be the first one to break it. Erin took a few deep breaths and exhaled as quietly as she could through her mouth. It looked like something you’d learn in therapy.  
       “Should we,” she started, “have our terrible conversation now? Or wait until you’re off your shift?”  
       “I don’t have a shift,” he said, unhelpfully. “I work now open to close.”  
       “You must be very tired.”  
       “I don’t want to have a terrible conversation at all. Why don’t you just use your time to visit with Harry?”  
       “Why don’t I spend the four months I’m going to be down here avoiding you?”  
       “That’s not what I – “  
       “Can we just,” she said, “take five minutes to be shitty to each other so we don’t have to be shitty to each other for the rest of the time?”  
       Louis flinched at how she said “the time”. It implied its own finite nature. He started to understand the importance of taking advantage of it.  
       “You always called Harry. You never called me.”  
       “You didn’t come up and visit me at Christmas.”  
       “You always _wrote_ to Harry. You never wrote to me.”  
       “I wrote you an email the first day I was up there and you never wrote me back.”  
       “I fucking hate email, Erin. I texted you.”  
       “Well, I fucking hate texts.” She took another deep breath and exhaled. “I felt… like if I talked about my time up there you were going to judge me.”  
       “I don’t judge anyone. I just don’t like that you had to go.”  
       “I had a nervous breakdown, Louis. It’s not like I was supes into the idea myself.”  
       “Don’t use stupid internet slang when we’re fighting.”  
       “Don’t text ‘whats up’ to someone you haven’t seen in three months.”  
       Louis swallowed and looked back down at the floor. “Zayn is right. Your mum is gonna get pissed, and she’s gonna try to come down and get you.”  
       “Well, I’m 26 years old, so. I think I can handle that,” Erin said. “I really want to be here.”  
       Louis slowly started to nod. “Okay.” He stood from his spot perched on the edge of her suitcase and went for the office door. “Then you’re back on staff schedules. Let me know what else you can handle after that, okay?”  
       “Okay.”  
       “See you at Niall’s.”  
         
       Liam dragged a bag of clean clothes home from the main road where he'd found his nearest laundromat, thinking longingly of a time he had a washer dryer hookup in his own apartment. He turned the corner surprised to find the lights in the garage still blaring, and the radio turned up even louder than when he’d left to start the task after his shift. Leaning into the sticky door, Liam shoved his way inside and found Louis and Niall sat atop a car on a lift not dissimilar to the way he’d found Niall when he first arrived. Zayn and Erin were on the floor with a spilled bucket of chalk drawing around a couple of propped up beers. Harry was dancing to Animal Collective. Badly.  
       “Well, thankfully I’ve already folded.”  
       “Hey!” The whole ensemble lifted a beer or a piece of chalk to celebrate his arrival. In about a month straight of scattered nights and confused, missed connections, Liam could identify that moment as the first time he felt like he lived here in New York with the others.  
       “What’s on the agenda for tonight? Some bar in the basement of a hot dog place we have to get to through a phone booth?”  
       “That exists,” Harry said with an unflattering spin. “But no. We’re hanging here. Drop your shit off and grab a drink.”  
       He spent the next hour of the night getting grilled from Erin about how he’d ended up in the city sharing such a small space with such a scattered person. He and Niall in turn shared stories from their formative years back in England and the boys talked longingly for a bit of the things that they remembered.  
       “Nandos,” Niall said with a groan.  
       “Real chips,” Zayn chimed in.  
       “That kind of rain,” Harry said, “where it’s not even really humid enough to rain, but London just has to refuse to let in the sun anyway.”  
       “When did you move here, Harry?” asked Liam.  
       “My biological mom brought me here when I was five. She left the next year. Diane and Erin swiped me the year after that.”  
       “Did you live in foster homes?”  
       “I did.” He walked in his most careful balance across a length of wood while he counted them out on the fingers of his left hand. “Derek was a police officer. Harold and Claudia were librarians who drank too much. Susan was a speech therapist who made me wash my hands seven times when I came home from school. Luke and Kelly were, quite simply, assholes. They almost got me, too. I had to live with a lawyer the two months I spent contesting them in court.”  
       “At seven?”  
       “Well, I didn’t do any cross-examining myself.” He jumped off the other end.  
       “Ugh,” Louis leaned back onto the hood of the car and balanced his empty beer bottle on top of his forehead. “Liam is in a questiony mood again.”  
       “Inquisitive,” Zayn offered. Louis’ bottle whizzed by his head.  
       “I have an idea,” Erin said. “Let’s play a game.”  
       Liam’s stomach jolted with a kind of giddy relief. This was the first time he realized that the usual schedule of work and play had taken its toll on his ability to sit quietly and talk at a normal volume in a location that afforded him ample room to move. By comparison sitting here had felt quite useless. Louis and Niall descended from the car, and the lot of them gathered in a circle around the chalk drawings of dragons Zayn had eating Erin’s modest two family home.  
       “Everyone get a beer.” With the exception of Louis, this was an unnecessary command. “We go around in a circle and say an activity and a period of time. You take one drink for each of the times you’ve done that thing in that period. So for example I could say number of times you’ve listened to Justin Bieber in the last 24 hours and – “ Niall took a drink. The others sat still. “Exactly.”  
       “Where’d you get this?” said Harry.  
       “It’s a modified therapy game. We did positive thoughts, rewarded ourselves with Skittles.” She shrugged. “Anyway, try not to be an asshole and say something like ‘number of times you breathed in the last month’ because no one wants to go to the hospital tonight. But try not to be the other kind of asshole and ask as how many times we’ve, I don’t know, ever stormed a castle.”  
       Harry took a drink. The group chuckled.  
       “I think since he’s in such an ‘inquisitive’ mood,” Erin said, Zayn pumping his fist in vernacular victory, “Liam should go first.”  
       “It’s nice to have someone in charge again,” Harry muttered. Zayn and Niall laughed.  
       “Hm, let me think…” Liam bit his lip. “Okay. Number of nights in the last week that you don’t remember.”  
       He and Niall each drank once, Zayn twice. The others not at all.  
       “Okay, clockwise. Niall.”  
       “Number of nights in the last week you WISH you didn’t remember.”  
       Liam, Niall, Erin and Louis each took a drink.  
       “Zayn.”  
       Zayn got a mischievous look on his face. “Number of tattoos you have.”  
       “Fuck you,” Harry muttered.  
       Liam took three sips and watched the rest. Erin was next out, Louis after that. Zayn and Harry gulped for quite a while. But it was Harry to bow out last.  
       “That was brutal to watch,” Erin said. “I got you though, bro. Number of tattoos you’ve GIVEN in the past month.”  
       With a bitter shake of his head, Zayn took another long series of gulps.  
       “ _That’s_ your other job…” Liam said.  
       When Zayn finished, Louis made to speak, but Zayn interrupted him first.  
       “Hey, no.” He pointed his bottle at Harry. “Don’t fucking lie, man. Drink up.”  
       With a sheepish grin, Harry took a drink.  
       “What??” Erin cried.  
       “I did.”  
       “You can’t draw for shit!”  
       “How come I didn’t know about this?” Louis said.  
       “I didn’t draw it, I just did it,” Harry replied. Then, with an equally accusatory point at Zayn, “He made me. He broke into the shop.”  
       “I did.”  
       “We were drunk,” Harry laughed. He found that now someone brought it up the whole story poured out his mouth like it'd been waiting. “And he wanted a star right here.” He pointed across the circle like he was going to show everyone on Zayn, but too lazy or embarrassed to do so, pointed to his own shoulder. “Here. And he said he couldn’t reach. So we went to Adorned and did it ourselves.”  
       “When the fuck was this?” Louis said.  
       “Um…” Harry thought, but Zayn chimed in.  
       “After Brandon’s party, beginning of the month.”  
       “Wow,” Erin said. “That’s potentially the stupidest thing either of you have ever done.”  
       “A true achievement,” Louis agreed. “Alright, I can’t think of one. I bequeath my turn to Niall.”  
       “Bequeath?” Zayn mouthed to Louis from across the circle. Louis nodded, proud.  
       “Alright, pressure,” Niall said, eyes to the ceiling. “Eh, let’s just go number of people you’ve slept with in the last, eh, three months. Individual people. Don’t want to make anyone sick.”  
       Niall answered his own question with ten sips and a finished beer. Liam took one and hid his embarrassment in his lap. Harry took three drinks; Zayn had to think a second and took five. Louis shot an annoyed look at Niall’s retreating back off to get another beer before taking six and avoiding everyone else’s gaze. Erin took none and didn’t watch.  
       “My turn,” Harry said, by way of alleviating the tension. “Number of times you’ve argued with your mum in the past six months.”  
       There were peppered sips here and there, Louis drank none, but Erin smiled at Harry before finishing the beer she had in her hand.  
       “Just wanted to catch you up,” Harry muttered. Erin raised her new beer up in response.  
       “Oh, I’ve got another good one.” Liam stumbled to a sit after getting his own second beer. “I’ve just moved, so number of places you’ve ever lived. Actual places, not cities. Buildings, you know? Addresses.”  
       “We know about buildings, Liam,” said Louis, and took four drinks straight off the bat.  
       Zayn took three, Niall two. Erin took two as well, thought a moment, and took another. Harry squinted and didn’t drink at all.  
       “Harry?” Liam said. “Are you secretly homeless?”  
       “No,” he said thoughtfully, “I’m just trying to figure out what counts as ‘lived in’.”  
       “Spent longer than six months,” Liam said.  
       “Harry is a wandering soul,” Louis said as Harry took his appropriate number of drinks.  
       “I counted your place, because, you know, accumulatively.”  
       Louis nodded in agreement.  
       “Okay, this one’s in honor of you, Liam,” said Niall.  
       “Hey, you just went,” Harry protested.  
       “I got that one from Louis!”  
       “Bequeathed,” Zayn said again and he and Louis suffered a fit of drunken giggles.  
       “Okay,” Niall continued, “number of times you’ve cheated or been cheated on.”  
       “Ouch,” said Liam.  
       Niall put a hand on his shoulder. “We’re gonna drink her away, bro.”  
       “She’s not gone yet?” Liam laughed and took a drink.  
       Zayn took one, too. Harry thought for a second, weighed something with a tilt of his head and took a drink as well. Louis spun the bottle around in his hand and seemed about ready to lift it when Erin reached over and gently pushed his arm back down with a surreptitious shake of her head.  
       “Well, now I feel like a sucker,” Liam groaned.  
       “You’re not a sucker, man,” Niall said sagely, giving him a pat on the back. “This is why you’re here. “  
       “This is why we’re all here,” Harry said, taking an unrequired swig of his drink. “Something went wrong someplace else, now we’re hiding out. Sort of sequestered along this little edge of this island, overlooking this other island that’s beautiful but too important for any of us and our shitty problems.”  
       “Sequestered,” Zayn muttered to himself. Erin nodded in approval.  
       Harry grinned ear to ear. It was devastatingly adorable in the most childish way but also incredibly sad. “So, welcome to the club.”  
       They raised a strange sort of toast to Liam. And this was the first time Liam understood that feeling at home here and feeling useless here were exactly the same thing.  
       After that the game devolved and soon enough Niall and Louis were back on the cars and Zayn to the chalk and not too much longer after that Harry and Erin walked hand-in-hand to his apartment.  
       Harry lived on the first floor of a tiny green house on Frost Street. His nearest subway stop was the Lorimar L, which meant he was part of a slightly quieter, less obnoxiously trendy area of the neighborhood than Louis and Niall and a more family-friendly, less frightening area of the neighborhood than Zayn in a basement off the JMZ. He and Erin had selected the apartment for the spacious backyard when they ran away to help Louis with the restaurant three years ago. Any backyard at all was rare in Brooklyn, and this place had enough room to actually grow some food they wouldn’t have to put on the roof or drive in from their mom’s place upstate. Erin took the front room, which a quiet girl named Melissa occupied now, and Harry the back so he could check on the garden at odd hours in the night. Now, six months after leaving him, Erin stayed in that room with Harry, glass door cracked to let in a bit of air on an uncommonly stuffy May night, laying on either side of a double bed, hands still meeting in the middle.  
       “How many times has she called you?”  
       Erin sighed. “Three. She’s not stupid, though. She knows what I did.”  
       “She can’t have the hospital come and take you?”  
       “I admitted myself. I never have to go back at all if I don’t want to.”  
       “You seem so much better.”  
       “Thanks.”  
       “I mean even from Christmas. You don’t even talk about it. It’s like it never happened at all.”  
       “It’s not like that to me.”  
       “I would imagine not.”  
       Erin bit her lip hard, rolled her eyes annoyed with her own show of emotion. “I hate her without you.” She choked down a sob she refused to let go.  
       “I know. But she gave us you and me.”  
       “Yeah.”  
       “And Lou.”  
       “Yeah.” She gulped but couldn’t hold onto it longer.  
       “I think you did really good with him.”  
       She laughed wryly. “Yeah, well last time he saw me I was on the floor of an empty room shouting that too many people were talking to me. So. It was an easy hurdle to jump.”  
       “I don’t mean about what he thinks, I mean about you. How does it feel being back? Is it at all overwhelming?”  
       “It’s been a day, monkey. Give me a week, we’ll reassess.”  
       Harry smiled lazily, shifted on the bed to kick off his covers and flip onto his stomach. Erin stayed still to let him adjust, then fixed the mess he’d left at the bottom of the bed.  
       “What about you and wonder boy?”  
       Harry’s groan could have been anywhere along the spectrum from frustrated to tired. “Still a thing,” he said, “that’s not a thing.”  
       “You’re still okay with that?”  
       “I’m fine. You and Louis, I swear to Christ.” He burrowed a bit deeper into his pillow so only a piece of his face was visible through his tumbling curls. “It’s just him I’m worried about. He’s gotta stop messing around with Charlie and Val and those assholes who can’t do anything fully fucking conscious. The past month we go to parties and nine times out of ten he disappears. And whatever. Louis, Niall and I aren’t exactly off whittling toy trains for needy kids, but every fucking time? Fucking stumbles into Lou’s house looking he’s been hit with a truck. He’s wicked skinny. It just sucks. I think he’s depressed but he just won’t talk about it, and I just have to watch him.”  
       “You do,” Erin said matter-of-factly. “You can’t change him. Look at your own damn wrist.”  
       “I know that,” Harry said, impatient. “But how many people I love am I gonna watch spiral out of my reach? You, Zayn. I know it’s been three years for Lou, but I swear to God, Erin, it’s any fucking day now with him.”  
       “Nah, he’ll hold on for you.”  
       Harry took a breath like he was going to reply but only shook his head and buried it just a bit further into the bed.  
       “Liam seems nice,” Erin offered.  
       Harry laughed. “Liam’s gonna realize in a hot fucking second if he wants to get his shit together he came to the wrong place.”  
  



	5. Chapter 5

       Two weeks later Liam moved in with Louis.  
       It had started to seem ridiculous to be splitting two sides of a broken Ikea futon when a perfectly good loft with four essentially vacant rooms sat only a handful of blocks away. One day after work, another in a long string now of low-key evenings spent at the car shop or in the park, Louis and Liam had, through some sort of silent communication, joined up in tricking Harry into believing that toddlers couldn’t fully flex their elbows until they were four years old. Harry found out, started chucking stones at them, and as they ran for the pier to jump into the river to avoid him if they had to, Louis called out the offer and Liam accepted. Niall referred to this as romantic many times in the weeks that followed.  
       If Liam were to be honest with himself he would admit he wasn’t entirely sure this was the best idea. Louis only made him contribute one quarter of the rent even though there were but two primary occupants. Regardless, paying anything at all seemed to cement Liam in this town with these people, and he wasn’t mentally prepared to make that kind of commitment. Firstly, because the last major commitment he had made had ended up with him walking into his own bedroom to find his girlfriend and his family member fucking. But secondarily because he was fairly convinced this city was putting him through an emotional turmoil.  
       See, after the first month he spent with these boys in this place the one thing you could not escape without a deep sense of was possibility. Whereas once even weekly plans seemed like some kind of social achievement, like a life lived to its relative fullness, now he was aware of so much, was built for such capacity, not having _daily_ plans seemed like a complete and total failure. Liam found he was regularly disappointed, most of the time for no identifiable reason at all. This tug of war between what was possible and what was actual was more violent in this city than anywhere Liam had ever experienced before. It made him tired, and he was convinced it was what made Zayn seek solace in such strange places, made Harry hang on to him regardless, and made Louis sleep every night on the couch.  
       The funny thing about New York, though, was that every time you started to feel like you were just too poor and just too tired and just not ready to have established yourself in such an environment to the level that people were dependent on your money and time, it had a way of reminding you why you were here in the first place.   
       It was a Saturday, the day after his last bag migrated to Louis’ loft apartment, and he, Louis, Niall, and Zayn were about to take a break from the remains of the brunch time rush to make a toast to the occupation of one of Louis’ comically empty rooms. Zayn’s brow furrowed as he poured, and he noted Harry’s absence in the group.  
       “Where are the Styles?” he said, shooting glances around the restaurant.  
       “Dunno.” Louis did the same. “He hasn’t got a delivery, he didn’t come.”  
       “Hold on,” Niall said. “Don’t do it, I’ll give him a text.” But just as he reached for his phone a thoroughly ruffled looking Harry and Erin burst in through the door.  
       “Whisripesrdunasho.” Harry leaned on the bar, out of breath.  
       “Replay?” Louis said.  
       Harry took a breath. “The White Stripes. Are playing a show. Free show. Surprise show.” He pointed wildly to the far wall. “East River Park.”  
       “Right now??”  
       Harry nodded and waved around his phone.  
       “Brooklyn Vegan’s Twitter confirmed it,” Erin clarified.  
       Louis suddenly got very serious. “This is crucial.” He laid a finger on Harry’s lips, not like Harry was in any position to interrupt him anyway. “How do we know it’s not one of Jack White’s 47 other bands?”  
       Harry’s eyes only got wide. Erin, hid partially behind her brother’s much larger frame, pushed forward around him and laid an emphatic hand on the bar.  
       “We saw Meg White leaving Duane Reade with a bottle of water, a bag of Smartfood Popcorn… and her drum sticks in hand.”  
       Zayn was already over top of the bar. Louis meant to exclaim something, but when first he tried it only came out at a normal indoor volume.  
       “Everyone get out, we’re closed.”  
       Only the few people around the bar reacted. He tried again.  
       “Get out! Everyone get out! We’re closed!”  
       That time it sounded much more like Louis. Harry and Zayn were already outside the door, waving violently at Erin to follow, but she lingered just inside, watching painfully as the customers didn’t know how to react.   
       “Guys,” Louis said, “Meg White is in Brooklyn. I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”  
       “Wait, no.” Niall laid a hand on Louis who jumped at his touch like feral cat. “Man, I’ll watch the place, it’s fine. What’s it gonna be, an hour? I don’t care. Just go. I got this. Terry’s here, we’re fine.”  
       “Yeah,” Liam agreed. “Go. You don’t have to kick everyone out.”  
       For a moment it looked as though Louis would reject the idea, peering at them both like they would be mad to think they could ever do his job for longer than the span of half a moment. Ultimately, however, Meg White won. He leapt at them both and planted a kiss each on their cheeks before darting after the others and bursting out the door.  
       Liam laughed at their retreating backs. The same jolt in his stomach that had so badly needed the activity of Erin’s drinking game reared its ugly head now, watching some of the diners around him abandon their meals anyway and toss out way too many twenty dollar bills to cover their speedy exit for the show.  
       “We’ll have to thank Jack White for the tips,” Niall said.  
       Another few minutes passed as they tended to the smaller remaining crowd. Liam kept darting automatic glances out the picture windows, noticed that the street seemed unusually crowded even for a springtime Saturday afternoon. He must have been staring quite a while, because Niall had his hand on his shoulder before he was even aware he’d approached.   
       “Go,” he said. “There’s no one here anyway. This is the shit you move here for.”  
       Liam barely tried to protest. He had to admit to himself he’d hardly listened to The White Stripes at all. But he knew enough to know they were talented, important, and broken up now for a number of years. Niall was right, this was the stuff that New York City potential was made of, the stuff you chased when you went out at night and nine times out of ten came home let down.   
       He turned the corner and walked all the way over to the water where he found a very strange sight indeed. Kent Ave, usually empty, was downright crowded with people, all of them migrating north to the same spot. Liam joined in, listening to the buzz of the groups of revelers go over the detailed rumors as he passed them by.  
       “They’re doing one in a few cities.”  
       “Are they only playing stuff off Get Behind Me Satan?”  
       “How have you not called Andrew?”  
       “Lol, MTV just posted about it. No one who follows you cares, MTV.”  
       The first notes of an electric guitar rang out; a voice, unclear from the distance, came on over a mic. Not only did the crowd distantly in front of the stage go crazy, but everyone on the street started to cheer as well. There was a lot of swearing and a lot of exclaiming that they couldn’t believe [insert friend’s name here] had been right.  
       The crowd turned in towards an opening in a wrought iron fence that stood at twice Liam’s height. Cops or security guards or maybe a combination of both lined the gap, which looked like it could have been four times as wide if they had been equipped for it to. Liam ducked in behind one of their arms and slid into the park. As he pulled out his phone to give Louis a text, he heard the police officers tell the crowd they could not, legally, allow anyone else inside.  
       All Louis said in response to his inquiry of their whereabouts was “right electric box,” only “electric” had been misspelled. Liam walked around the back of the audience and headed for the right side of the stage. The band launched into a song and hands, arms, whole bodies threw themselves up into the air around him. It felt like all the ground they stood on had been lifted except for his. He suspected more people would protest to him pushing forward were they not so distracted by their own excitement. Jack White sang. They sang. Everyone knew all the words.  
       Suddenly, from overtop all the other jumping and flailing members of the crowd, one petite female went shooting up over heads and grabbed at a large metal heap that jutted out of the lawn. She couldn’t hold on, and she fell back into the fray. But Liam had already seen the electric box.  
       “Hey!”  
       “ – two, three, go!”  
       None of them noticed his arrival. Louis and Harry had their shoulders under each of Erin’s legs and were attempting to hoist her onto the platform for a better view. Zayn was shaking with laughter.   
       Erin was, too. “Stop! Stop! I’m fine down there!”  
       “Ah, fuck!” Louis slipped and lost his half and the three of them stumbled sideways onto the lawn in hysterics.  
        Zayn laid an arm around Liam’s shoulder and grabbed, hyper, at the rest.  
       “Over here, over here.”  
       They moved sideways to a pocket of space where the box would be less trouble. Whirling to look toward the stage, the four of their faces immediately lit up and Louis lifted his arms into the air in triumph.  
       “Fuuuuuuuck!” he yelled in an undefinable excitement.  
       Zayn laid a hand on either of Harry’s shoulders and just bounced, not needing to better see, just full of excess energy that required him to do anything at all. Erin looked like she might throw up. She gaped at the stage like it were the most beautiful sight she’d seen in many months. Thinking of it, Liam had to assume it probably was.  
       “Marry me, Meg!” she shouted as the duo finished their first song.  
       “Marry me first!” Louis said.  
       “Polygamy can be really interesting,” Erin added, “if all involved parties willingly consent!”  
       “Just give it five minutes thought, Meg!” Louis said. “Just five!”  
       The guitar launched into the following tune and the four of them nearly collapsed. Louis grabbed Erin and spun her around but it almost looked like she didn’t even notice. Harry just stood with his hands over his mouth even though his whole body jostled with his involuntary involvement in Zayn’s energy behind him.  
       Looking around, this was the reaction from everyone. Unconsciously grasping hands, shook heads, expressions of distress, rapid texting, linked arms, arms in the air. Mouths forming words they knew by heart, had let define moments of their lives only from headphones but never thought they’d hear sung at them live ever again. Each group of people Liam observed seemed connected to each other in these small and distinct ways but were separate from the entire rest of time.   
       Nowhere was this more evident than with his four companions. He’d been here nearly two months and had learned a fair amount about the roughly three years since Louis inherited the restaurant and just a little before. He’d done his best to create a picture, if only so he could put himself into it. But now it was here right in front him, what these guys were before premature responsibility, ill mental health, poorly chosen friends and rampant sexual confusion. They were best friends, siblings, lovers, almost interchangeably so, enraptured in a moment that both defined and justified why they’d chosen this life in the first place. If this was recalling the foursome’s earlier years, it was also forming Liam’s current ones, laying the tracks for the memories he knew he’d recall when he was also three years removed. It reaffirmed Liam’s own decision in him. New York reeled him back in.  
       Song after song passed at a neck-breaking pace, some Liam knew and most he did not. Every time Zayn would jump higher, Harry look more helpless, Louis and Erin yell increasingly inappropriate suggestions to that poor, anxiety-ridden drummer. Liam let it all wash over him, found himself jumping and fist-pumping along with the rest of the much more familiar crowd. All too soon, the guitar screeched to an abrupt halt, the duo took a bow too reserved for the havoc they’d just wreaked, and they exited the stage.   
       Stories from the crowd outside on Twitter would later reveal they had ducked into a van within the first few minutes and taken off, leaving the small band of roadies to pack up and follow. Liam and the others saw and cared about none of this. As the audience slowly thinned and filtered out to parts unknown, Liam watched his four friends in the aftermath, their separate reactions distinct and amusing in equal parts.  
       Zayn just walked around shaking his head.  
       Louis continued to randomly scream the word “fuck”.  
       Erin laid quietly down on the ground, let her limbs fall to all sides, and muttered, “I just came everywhere,” not loud, but loud enough to attract raised eyebrows from departing concert-goers.  
       After a solid hour of simple shock, Harry’s reaction was perhaps the most amusing to witness. He stared at the stage a few moments longer as the others went on with their own reactions. Then he turned to Zayn.  
       “I want to die.”  
       Zayn went from shaking his head to nodding.  
       “I actually,” Harry continued, “want to lay down and to die… here… on this spot.”  
       “Fuck,” Louis said again.  
       “Would one of you kill me?” Harry said. “Please? I feel… like I’ve done so much for you.”  
       Zayn smiled and directed Harry as he’d done Liam, with a hand around his shoulders and a gentle shove. Louis grabbed Erin’s hands and pulled her to her feet. The five of them stumbled on the uneven grass towards the exit.  
       The crowd that Liam had followed like a wave up to the park was now trickling back in the other direction like a lackluster stream. Twos and threes and larger groups peeled off from the sum and meandered down side streets with contented sighs. Liam watched them part and tried to take in their details – different accents, different styles - a collection of exported people headed to their own personal corners of this congregated town. He looked out past one of the new high rise buildings Harry hated so much at that iconic skyline, the massive city, and contemplated so many more such occupants within its walls. He looked back at his own group. Zayn kept his arm around Harry’s shoulder; Louis had never let go of one of Erin’s hands.  
       “I just… want to not… exist anymore, you know?”  
       “Fuck.”


End file.
